By contrast Stat Counter reckoned IE to have 34.35 percent, Firefox to have 24.85 percent, and Chrome to have 31.09 percent near the end of April.

There are a lot of possible reasons for these discrepancies. One possible cause is that Stat Counter may favor the kinds of sites visited by individual (home) users, who are more likely to be using a third party browser, versus a business user who is more likely to be using IE. So don't consider IE's downgrade to second place official quite yet, but do take the reports as indication of Google Chrome's remarkable rise and increasing market traction.

Update: Wed. May 23, 2012:

A reader "Joe" helpfully chimes in:

We've looked into Chrome for our enterprise, and once we realized what what going on with the statcounters, we stopped. Global Stat's tracks HITS, where as NetmarketShare